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The book is not built as a treatise but as a forensic conceit sustained across twenty-two short chapters: reality has been murdered, and the book is the report of an investigation into a crime that can never be solved because it has no perpetrator, no victim, and no motive. The thesis is announced on the unpaginated epigraph leaf and then never abandoned; every chapter is a re-description of the same event from a fresh angle (physics, photography, AIDS, Warhol, Sarajevo, sexual difference), which is why the argument is rebuildable from any one chapter but completes itself only as accumulation. The single inversion underneath the whole is that illusion is primary and reality is the late arrival — so the “crime” is not that illusion killed the real but that the real (and its technical perfection) is exterminating illusion.
The book opens by stating its own genre and its own impossibility in the same breath. The whole epigraph is load-bearing and recurs as the book's refrain, so it is carried in full.
Perfect Crime, epigraph leaf
This is the story of a crime — of the murder of reality. And the extermination of an illusion — the vital illusion, the radical illusion of the world. The real does not disappear into illusion; it is illusion that disappears into integral reality.
Perfect Crime, epigraph leaf
If the crime were perfect, this book would have to be perfect too, since it claims to be the reconstruction of the crime.
Perfect Crime, epigraph leaf
Alas, the crime is never perfect. Moreover, in this grim record of the disappearance of the real, it has not been possible to pin down either the motives or the perpetrators, and the corpse of the real itself has never been found. And the idea which underlies the book has never been pinned down either. That idea was the murder weapon.
Perfect Crime, epigraph leaf
Though the crime is never perfect, perfection, true to its name, is always criminal. In the perfect crime it is the perfection itself which is the crime, just as, in the transparence of evil, it is the transparence itself that is the evil. But perfection is always punished: the punishment for perfection is reproduction.
Perfect Crime, epigraph leaf
Are there extenuating circumstances to this crime? Certainly not, since these always have to be sought among the motives or the perpetrators. But the crime has no motivation and no perpetrator, and therefore remains perfectly inexplicable. This is its true perfection.
The opening chapter establishes the crime's structure: no murderer, no victim, because the two are merged. The Eric Gans citation is doing the establishing work and is followed immediately by Baudrillard's own mirroring of it (subject/object for victim/persecutor), so both loci are carried.
Perfect Crime, p. 0
Though the consequences of the crime are never-ending, there is neither murderer nor victim. If there were either, the secret of the crime would be unmasked some day, and the inquiry concluded. The secret, in the end, is that the two are merged: ‘In the last analysis, the victim and the persecutor are one. We can only grasp the unity of the human race if we can grasp, in all its horror, the truth of this ultimate equivalence’ (Eric Gans).
Perfect Crime, p. 0
In the last analysis, object and subject are one. We can only grasp the essence of the world if we can grasp, in all its irony, the truth of this radical equivalence.
The crime is defined by tracelessness; its imperfection is that appearances are the clues. Both halves of the figure are carried, since the trace/tracelessness opposition is the book's constant.
Perfect Crime, p. 1
Were it not for appearances, the world would be a perfect crime, that is, a crime without a criminal, without a victim and without a motive. And the truth would forever have withdrawn from it and its secret would never be revealed, for want of any clues [traces] being left behind.
Perfect Crime, p. 1
But the fact is that the crime is never perfect, for the world betrays itself by appearances, which are the clues to its non-existence, the traces of the continuity of the nothing. For the nothing itself — the continuity of the nothing — leaves traces. And that is the way the world betrays its secret. That is the way it allows itself to be sensed, while at the same time hiding away behind appearances.
The artist is introduced not as an object of exposition but as the figure who keeps the crime imperfect (Michaux); the complete contiguous passage is carried so the figure arrives through the move.
Perfect Crime, p. 1
The artist, too, is always close to committing the perfect crime: saying nothing. But he turns away from it, and his work is the trace of that criminal imperfection. The artist is, in Michaux's words, the one who, with all his might, resists the fundamental drive not to leave traces.
Perfect Crime, p. 1
The perfection of the crime lies in the fact that it has always-already been accomplished — perfectum. A misappropriation of the world as it is, before it even shows itself. It will never, therefore, be discovered. There will be no Last Judgement to punish or pardon it. There will be no end, because things have always-already happened. Neither resolution nor absolution, but inevitable unfolding of the consequences.
The question-reversal that the book treats as its axis, with the definition of the “material illusion” that follows it:
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